Welcome to the November edition of our newsletter from Links Childcare Drumcondra.
November has been a busy month in all our rooms, as we prepare for our Christmas concert and our festive winter celebrations. We have been concentrating very hard on learning all the lines to our Christmas songs and we cannot wait to give you all a festive performance to remember. We hope you like our Christmas decorations! Our children and our afterschool children worked very hard to help us decorate it.
We had a month of learning all about the winter season and the changing of the weather. Our Educarers taught us all about winter hibernation and the different types of animals who hibernate in the winter in order to keep themselves and their little ones safe during the cold months.
Our STEM learning was a great way for our children to learn about this important topic. It opened up conversations about counting, coding, science and more.
And thank you to all our parents who voted in the Links Childcare Employee of the Year for 2019. Your voice and your vote matters. Thank you for your time in doing this and the winners for Links Balbriggan will be announced very shortly in the coming days.
Last but not least, we would like to send you all a massive THANK YOU for all your gorgeous shoe boxes for the Team Hope Shoe Box Appeal. Collectively you helped Links Childcare collect almost 300 shoe boxes. These will all be going to a great home this Christmas and will make a child very happy.
We hope you enjoy our newsletter and we look forward to lots more fun & festive learning next month.
Kind regards,
Claire
Claire McCann —Crèche Manager
Baby Room News
Our babies made an autumn tree and the children explored autumn fruits, too, which was very interesting. We had a fruit tasting day and painted with fruit slices too. It was hard stopping the babies from eating the painted fruits! They were fascinated.
They also experienced painting with cars and trucks and they loved this activity. Lots of gross motor activities was enjoyed too, such as dancing, ball games and crawling through tunnels.
The baby room updated their treasure basket with biscuit tins which make lots of great noises.
Wobbler Room News
The children are very interested in their clothes at the moment. Taking off their coats, shoes and socks, and dressing up is great fun for them. The wobblers made a ‘boy’ from cardboard so the children could dress him up in different clothes. They love it. We also had lots of arts and crafts making winter clothes.
The wobblers experimented hot and cold and made volcano experiments for STEM day.
The children took part in lots of messy play with playdough and gloop, and explored different textures. They particularly loved painting their hands and feet.
Toddler Room News
Messy and sensory play was play in abundance, were we did lots of messy play using paint, lentils, coconuts, mud and pop-poms. We made sensory bottles to extend on this interest. The children learned lots of new senses and words such as soft, hard, sticky. We also explored sand, water and playdough.
The children made a story theatre where the children created their own stories from Disney princesses to Peppa pig. The children have been loving Storytime this month.
For physical activity, the children have been exploring their bodies through outdoor games, yoga, dancing and indoor warmups. The children took part in different types of racing including crawling, walking and jumping. It was lots of fun.
Preschool Room News
Some events we enjoyed in Preschool included:
– National STEM day
– Hibernation Day
– Welcoming Winter
– Thanksgiving
We had lots of fun talking about our community around us and the people who help us. We discussed about different jobs and what our mums and dads work at. Our children did lots of lovely role play them around various vocations, such as doctors, nurses, dentists, shopkeepers.
For our Winter arts and crafts, we made different snowflakes, snowmen and stockings.
For our Travelling box, preschool 1 and 2 have been working on a project with a pre-school in Spain. The children are sent a box to Spain with some crafts they have made a letter to tell the pre-school in Spain what they do. They will eagerly await a reply from our friends in Spain.
We also did some Spanish counting and colours and we loved painting with our feet and hands, and learning about symmetry through painting.
Baking cookies and muffins was so much fun and tasty too!
For the farm, we read books about animals and farm machinery. During arts and crafts we did lots of drawing of animals using circle shapes and enjoyed animal games in the garden.
We are fascinated by the wonderful world of dinosaurs, and we loved arts and crafts relating to this. We also did lots of reading about dinosaurs
The pre-schoolers are very busy in preparation for their Christmas concert, which will take place in a few days time.
